Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.

Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars." Can we ever avoid repeating history?

Review

Review

"Listeners are treated to Morey's passionate reading…keep[ing] things lively, especially when leavening in personal narratives and surprising expressions of humanity during the war.…Informative and entertaining, this is a palatable version of monumental events that continue to animate the course of our world." ---Booklist Audio Review

Synopsis

Award-winning author Adam Hochschild explores the First World War with a particular focus on the conflict between the critics and the supporters of the war.

About the Author

Adam Hochschild is the author of a number of books, including Half the Way Home, The Mirror at Midnight, and The Unquiet Ghost. Three of his books, including King Leopold's Ghost, have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. Adam has also written for the New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He teaches writing in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco. Arthur Morey has performed in theaters and cabarets in New York, Chicago, and Milan. He freelanced scripts for Paramount and ABC-TV and won awards for both plays and fiction. A former literary manager of Chicago's Body Politic Theatre, he taught acting at Fordham and writing at SUNY Rockland, Northwestern University, and the School of the Art Institute. He edited Viola Spolin for Northwestern University Press and later was managing editor at Renaissance Books in Los Angeles. Winner of a number AudioFile Earphones Awards, he has narrated novels by John Irving, Nathan Englander, Richard Russo, and John Burnam Schwartz, as well as nonfiction by Kurt Eichenwald, John McCain, George Tenet, Deepak Chopra, Gay Talese, and others.